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In 1999, Snopes came across this question about musician Lee Greenwood, the writer and performer of the patriotic song God Bless the USA: When the ground combat phase of the Persian Gulf War brought about Iraq’s surrender in a startlingly short 100 hours in February 1991, one could hardly watch television or listen to the radio without hearing the stirringly patriotic song God Bless the USA, written and performed by Greenwood, at least once a day. (Greenwood was the Country Music Association’s award for Male Vocalist of the Year in 1983 and 1984, and his God Bless the USA had been awarded the CMA’s Song of the Year honors in 1985.) As a result, the song become even more firmly entrenched as staple background music for Persian Gulf War retrospectives, Independence Day celebrations, and Memorial Day and Veterans Day remembrance ceremonies, and it has undergone another resurgence in popularity since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In case you’re not an American who now has the lyrics permanently memorized, here they are: It didn’t take long for the rumor to begin that Greenwood, who was reaping acclaim (and royalties) for his modern-day American anthem, was actually a draft dodger who fled the USA for Canada in order to avoid being drafted to serve in the Vietnam War. It doesn’t take much familiarity with urban legends to see this as another famous person is the opposite of his public persona tale, the flip side to claims that musician John Denver served as a sniper for the U.S. Army and children’s television host Mr. Rogers (Fred Rogers) was once a member of one of America’s elite military forces. Greenwood was born on Oct. 27, 1942. During the Vietnam War era, young men between the ages of 18 and 26 were eligible to be drafted for military service, and until the lottery system was instituted at the end of 1969, the order of call was to take oldest first. As Greenwood turned 26 at the tail end of 1968, this would have made him a prime draft candidate throughout 1969. The biography on his official website mentions that he forsook a college scholarship, a promising baseball career, and even his own high school graduation in the early 1960s to perform as a musician in Nevada casino lounges. He performed by night and dealt blackjack by day before moving to Los Angeles, breaking through with a demo session in Nashville in 1978, and scoring success with It Turns Me Inside Out in 1981. Since details of Greenwood’s life during the late 1960s are difficult to come by, we asked him directly: (A 3-A classification was a hardship deferment given to an eligible male if service would cause hardship upon his family.) A Los Angeles Times article about Greenwood noted that he is familiar with the experience of a father going off to war while leaving a wife and children at home, but from the other side: Greenwood may not fit the image of the super patriot who rushes out to enlist and serve his country during wartime (the song isn’t written from the point of view of someone who claims to have made sacrifices for his country — it’s an expression of gratitude towards those who did make sacrifices to protect the freedoms the rest of us enjoy), but very few celebrities do live up to the expectations created by those who project the artist into his work. (Stephen Crane, for example, wrote quite convincingly of the horrors of war without having experienced them first-hand, but The Red Badge of Courage is no less a masterpiece of literature — and Crane is no less an author. Greenwood may not be a veteran himself, but neither was he a draft dodger.
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